Mobile devices are ubiquitous today. Many people have even cancelled traditional landline telephone services at their residences and/or businesses, and have adopted mobile phones as their primary means of communications. Accordingly, many people typically carry such mobile devices with them wherever they go. For purposes of the discussion hereinbelow, mobile devices include mobile telephones, personal digital assistants, and other portable computing devices that have a network communications interface, an input interface such as a keypad or keyboard, and an output interface such as a display. Mobile devices can include a subscriber identification module (“SIM”) card that can provide additional capabilities and/or capacity.
The capabilities of such mobile devices have increased with increases in their processing power, memory, screen size, etc. Even with such advances, it can still be disadvantageous to retrieve and store certain data on the mobile device. While the memory capacity of newer mobile devices is significantly larger in size than that of previous generation mobile devices, it is still limited or desired for use for other functionality, such as the storage of music, video, email, etc. Additionally, if the data is downloaded to the mobile device over a cellular network, the charges can be significant.
Once the data is on the mobile device, sharing of the data can be onerous. The user must select the particular files that he wishes to share, then transmit them to another party via email, file transfer protocol (“FTP”) or the like. Again, the charges for the data transfer over a cellular network can be significant. Further, if the user is sharing the data with multiple parties, the amount of data transmitted over the cellular network spirals.
It is an object of this invention to provide a novel method and system for sharing data.